One of the bigger stories in the wider tech industry this week was a "brandjacking" attack against some open-source package repositories, notably npm. The team at Sonatype (responsible for Maven Central) published a detailed response and some perspectives as to what it means for the Java ecosystem.
Microsoft announced the release of v3 of their Graph SDK in Java. The Graph API exposes REST APIs and client libraries to access data on Microsoft cloud services, including Microsoft 365 services and their Enterprise Mobility and Security services.
It was a busy week for OpenJDK, with Java 16 publishing a second release candidate (RC2). This was due to a fix that had been previously integrated at the tail end of an earlier rampdown phase but was not being included in the first Release Candidate build.
Updated Java 16 binaries are available from the usual place.
The additional release candidate has not affected the scheduled dates and Java 16 is still aiming for General Availability on 2021/03/16.
Looking beyond Java 16, there were some updates to the JEPs that describe Project Valhalla deliverables.
The "Primitive Objects (Preview)" JEP covers the basic semantics of identify-free primitive objects (previously known as inline classes, previously known as value types).
This JEP is paired with a companion "Unify the Basic Primitives with Objects (Preview)" which provides the retrofitting of Java's primitive types into the structure of primitive objects, and making all Java values objects (although primitive objects lack object identity).
These two JEPs do not cover everything that is needed to fully implement Valhalla - for example a additional, separate JEP will be needed to update Java's generics to allow primitive classes to be used as type parameters - but this has not been published yet.
The specialization of bytecode and generic classes is also not covered by the current JEPs, and would also appear as part of another JEP.
It's worth noting that all of these updated Project Valhalla JEPs are all still in draft state with nothing so far to indicate that they will definitely be included as part of Java 17, although with the likely designation of Java 17 as long-term support (LTS) there would of course be a great deal of interest in including preview versions of at least some of Valhalla's deliverables in that release.
